The classic children's book, The Prime Minister's Brain contains a sort of 1980s version of a hack day. Dinah, the brilliantly geeky heroine, gets invited to the Junior Computer Brain of the Year Competition. She thinks she's there to play the Octopus Dare game; in fact (spoilers) it's a front for hacking into the Downing Street computer network.

This story provides a timely backdrop to Downing Street's recent plans to crack down on online pornography. In his announcement earlier this week, David Cameron challenged both the technology companies and their communities of users to solve such social problems:

You're the people who take pride in doing what they say can't be done. You hold hackathons for people to solve impossible internet conundrums. Well – hold a hackathon for child safety. Set your greatest brains to work on this. You are not separate from our society, you are part of our society, and you must play a responsible role in it.

The potential of users to innovate processes first hit policy back in 2008 with the "Innovation Nation" White Paper, which identified how individuals and communities were already, increasingly, innovating independently of businesses; and urged government to bring everyone together to "understand and take advantage of these opportunities". The paper was supported by over 30 years of research from the user innovation literature that identified how skilled users could build and modify the products or services they wanted – whether scientific instruments, sports equipment, or open source software – based around their own specific needs.

Coming out of management studies, much of the research looked at ways to channel this "democratised innovation" into the firms that could exploit its potential for wider markets. Many companies have drawn on this work to develop business models that aim to integrate users' activities with their own, hoping to find the sweet spot where user and company interests align.

However, as any fule kno, finding such alignment around the social, moral or ethical meaning of an innovation can be a bit of a nightmare. To put it another way, Cameron might see online pornography as a social problem, but does everyone? For all that we might live in an innovation nation the idea of "innovation" is as debatable and various as "technology", "science" or even "porn" for that matter.

Beyond the fact that to run an anti-pornography hack event would likely involve providing developers with extensive access to the very images (pdf) that the policy proposes to ban, technology community goodwill is also lacking. Technologists have called the plans "unworkable", potentially damaging to the UK web industry, and going after easy targets in the ISPs rather than tackling the real issues.

Take the false fronts that criminals install onto ATM machines to clone card details, for example. From one perspective they are a cracking form of user innovation, developed around specific needs and a lack of comparable products on the market; from another, they are a technology of organised crime. Illegality isn't necessarily a barrier to channelling user innovations into firms: several companies have harnessed "outlaw innovations" and repurposed them for their own, legitimised, ends.

User activities also don't need to be illegal to be considered aberrant by firms. When the Model T-Ford was first introduced in 1908 it was embraced and "modded" by rural farming communities. One Kansas farmer used the car as a stationary power source to run his household's washing machine; another, in Maine, found so many uses that the tax inspector didn't know whether to classify it as agricultural machinery or a "pleasure vehicle" (pdf). After early benevolent consideration of these activities, the Ford Motor Company decided to bring out their own line of trucks and tractors, and ordered their dealers not to supply the toolkits that would let users mod the automobile into cheaper versions of these machines, taking potential revenue away from the company.

What happens, then, when the desires and directions of government policy don't line up with those of user communities? In California, eyebrows have been raised at the financing of high-school hackerspaces by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. Over in the UK, the government has invested in "Meteor Beyond Visual range Air-to-Air Missiles" (pdf) as part of the next spending round, yet military involvement in public hack events has not been received positively. BAE Systems was potentially lined up to sponsor an open source "NodeCopter" hack day, but following discussion within the community around the event about the ethics of this, sponsorship was withdrawn.

At the end of The Prime Minister's Brain, Dinah does inadvertently find her way into the Downing Street network, but sabotages her attempts before they can be used by any evil masterminds. Following her example, it would be wise for policymakers to exercise caution around considering users as cheap and malleable forms of R&D to achieve some government-defined notion of "good".

Georgina Voss was awarded her PhD in Technology and Innovation Management from SPRU, University of Sussex, and is currently a researcher at the Royal College of Art. You can follow her on Twitter at @gsvoss